A free Photoshop rebuild that tells you exactly how unfinished it is

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PhotoCraft is a Photoshop lookalike written from scratch in Rust: same menus, same shortcuts, layers, masks, adjustment layers and layer styles, and it opens and saves real PSD files. It runs on Mac, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and in the browser, free under MIT or Apache 2.0, your pick. There's nothing to host. Download an installer and go; Mac and Windows builds are now signed. It also reads Krita, Paint.NET and Affinity files, loads Photoshop actions (.atn), and ships a command line tool and an MCP server, so an AI agent can drive the same commands the menus use. Hobbyists who just need to open a PSD without paying Adobe should try it now. Professionals shouldn't switch yet; the team's own roadmap rates it about 45% ready for real work, with about a dozen tools still missing, no generative fill and no .8BF plug-in support. GIMP and Krita are the mature free options. The catch: it launched in October 2026 and users file bug reports by the hundreds. Much of the code was written with Claude, which has people questioning the "clean-room" label. It's also the free front door to ArtCraft, the team's AI image and video studio, where subscriptions are optional, and nothing here is gated.

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HyperFrames turns HTML, CSS and animation libraries like GSAP, Lottie and Three.js into MP4 videos, frame by frame in headless Chrome, so the same input always renders the same video. HeyGen built it so AI coding agents can write videos as plain web pages, and uses it in production. It's Apache 2.0 with no per-render fees or headcount limits. Run npx hyperframes init, preview, render. You need Node 22+ and FFmpeg. Rendering locally is free; scaling out means building your own AWS Lambda or Cloud Run setup with their packages, or paying HeyGen for managed cloud rendering by the credit. It ships agent skills for Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and Gemini CLI, including one that ports Remotion compositions over. The obvious comparison is Remotion (remotion-dev/remotion), which is source-available and free only for individuals and companies of up to 3 employees; beyond that it's $25 a seat a month for creators or a $100 monthly minimum for automators. Any team of four or more building programmatic video should look hard at HyperFrames for that alone. Remotion still has the more mature cloud renderer. The catch: it's an on-ramp to HeyGen. The default media skill wants you signed into the HeyGen CLI for music, images, voice and avatars, cloud rendering bills HeyGen credits, and the CLI sends usage telemetry unless you turn it off. It's pre-1.0 and ships several releases a day, so pin your version. And hyperframes.app is a lookalike site, not HeyGen.

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PPT Master takes a PDF, Word doc, Markdown file, URL or pasted text and hands you back a native, editable PowerPoint: real shapes, text boxes and slide masters, not pictures of slides. A flag adds a second file with data-backed charts and tables you can open with Edit Data. Free, MIT licensed. It's a skill, not an app: you run it inside Claude Code, Cursor or Codex with Python 3.10+ and one pip install -r requirements.txt. It can also build a template from your brand deck, refill an existing deck, add animations and narrate the speaker notes. The examples gallery holds dozens of single-pass decks, so judge first. Solo builders and small teams turning reports into decks without a designer save hours. Larger teams with a brand group still want a human pass before anything goes external. The catch: quality tracks the model, and the first model the README recommends, Kimi K3, comes from a paying sponsor behind an affiliate link. The README also pushes API relays advertising Claude and GPT at as little as 7% of official rates. Pick the model on merit, and keep client documents away from resellers. The optional PDF converter needs AGPL-licensed PyMuPDF.

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VibeWise turns Claude Code or Codex into a pair-programming tutor. You propose the design, the agent asks questions and explains unfamiliar concepts at named checkpoints, then writes the code you agreed on. Its tagline is "You build. AI writes." It's a free MIT plugin for people who want to learn while they ship, from career-changers to experienced engineers in an unfamiliar stack. In Claude Code it now installs from Anthropic's plugin directory (/plugin install vibe-wise@anthropic-plugin-directory); restart and run /vibe-wise:learn. Codex installs from the author's GitHub marketplace and has no hook, so you rerun $vibe-wise:learn each session. Notes live in a .vibe-wise/ folder per project. No account, backend or telemetry. Builders without a CS background who code with AI and want to understand what they're shipping get the most here. Anyone who just wants output should skip it: it slows the build down on purpose. Anthropic's free learning-output-style plugin is the lighter option. The catch: one maintainer, no tagged releases, and ports to OpenCode, Cursor and Copilot CLI still sit in unmerged PRs. Install from the directory, which reviews each version. The GitHub route with auto-update on lands hook changes you never looked at.